Many of my most intense, crisis events are due to my own mistakes; usually concerning money. Today I had an easy morning. All I had to do was pack, walk across the street (sometime around 11:00am) and get on the bus to Barranquilla – a two hour trip. It got a little complicated.
First, I asked when the bus will leave, how much it cost, etc and bought my ticket. I had about 45 minutes to wait. After about 15 minutes all the passengers got up to pile onto the bus to Cartagena. I asked the cashier if this was the bus to Barranquilla. Barranquilla is on the road to Cartagena. She said ‘Yes’. It was. Accordingly, I hurried out with my bags, stowed one in the back, and climbed on. After a couple of hours we entered the busy city of Barranquilla. At this point I noticed that one of my bags was missing. In the hurry, I had left it on the seat in the waiting room. ‘Oh no!’ It was a smaller bag, but it contained minor objects such as some recharging cables, my lunch, a spare battery and (more serious) my Kindle. As I was contemplating this minor disaster I noticed that we were in fact traveling OUT of the city. I was missing a bag AND headed for the wrong city!
At this point my studying of Spanish suddenly became very important. I had to explain the whole situation to the driver including my claim that it was not my fault. I told him politely the we had 2 problems (note the ‘we’ in that statement.) I was holding a ticket saying – Barranquilla! Was there an office of the bus company in the city where I would be able to get help? Could they find my bag where I had left it, and could they send it to me? Most important, could they let me off the bus and how could return to Barranquilla since we were on a highway heading out of town?
The driver turned out to be surprisingly helpful. I described the bag, he phoned the office, they sent back a photo of my bag. (He did all of this while driving down the highway.) He asked my something that sounded like a small machine gun in action. What? He said it again. I quietly asked if he could speak more slowly. He laughed and said (in Spanish of course.) ‘What is the address of your hotel?’ There was then some talk of payment if the bag were to show up at my hotel at 5 pm. I promptly doubled his amount to something approaching $20.
The result was: he turned the bus around and took me to some taxis. I got in the taxi and had a chat with a young man who told me about the great things one can do around Barranquilla; the trip soon ended at my hotel. At 4:50, there was a knock on my door and there was a man with a motorcycle helmet and …My Bag! I paid up happily.
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